C is for Courage
by lunarchroniclesandcockatiels
Summary: It takes a lot of courage to die for someone. But it takes even more courage to live for them. T for mentions of death.


_"Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength."_

 _― Napoléon Bonaparte_

Percy woke up at 1:26 a.m. -according to his blue alarm clock, which was perched precariously on the edge of his nightstand- to find his eight-year old daughter splayed out on the floor next to the bed he shared with Annabeth, clutching a teddy bear that had seen better times. She was crying, quietly, so as not to wake everyone else, so it seemed, but crying all the same.

Attempting to not wake Annabeth- who needed the sleep so _badly_ \- he got out of bed, and crept over to where his daughter was.

"Cass?" he asked, watching the eerie silhouette that the lack of light in the room gave him, watching it creeped up behind him. Watched as it came closer and closer with every step he took. As he sat down on the floor.

"Yeah?" she whispered, rubbing at her eyes, fingering the teddy bear that Annabeth was always trying to get rid of.

"Why aren't you asleep?" Percy questioned. The young girl shrugged.

"I don't want to sleep," Cassie said, sticking her fingers in her mouth- something Percy hadn't seen her do since she was very small. Two or three, maybe? Wet tears were still apparent on her face.

"You'll be tired if you don't go to sleep," Percy warned, but he knew that it fell on deaf ears. Cassie had inherited her mother's stubbornness. "Besides," he added. "We're going to go to Camp-Half Blood tomorrow. You don't want to be tired when you visit all your friends."

Cassie shrugged, yawning.

"Come on," Percy insisted. "You're tired. You need sleep to survive, you know."

Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say, because the soon-to-be third grader burst into tears. Percy hugged her.

"I'm scared to sleep!" she cried.

"Cassie…." he tried, but what was he supposed to say?

How do you comfort a little girl whose brother died in his sleep?

"I don't wanna die!" she sobbed.

"Cassie, you're not going to die!"

"Charlie died! And I looked it up, and if you're related to someone with sleep apnea, you have a bigger chance of getting it! So I might die too!" Callie was crying so hard that Percy was beginning to worry about her going into hysterics.

"Cassie, you don't have sleep apnea! And even if you did, you rarely die from it! There are ways to treat it!" Percy wasn't trying to yell, he really wasn't, but his words came out louder than he wanted.

"Charlie died from it!" Cassie gasped, struggling to breath from the tears.

"Cassie, calm down!"

"No! I can't!"

Suddenly, the door burst open. Katherine, his almost five-year old daughter stood on the other side.

"What are you doing?" she asked with a slight lisp, squinting. "You woke me up."

"Nothing, Katherine," Percy told her sternly. "Go back to bed."

"Is Cassie being a crybaby again?" Katherine questioned. Percy froze, wishing that Annabeth was awake. She was much better at handling these types of situations than he was.

Sometimes he really was a Seaweed Brain.

"No, Katherine," Percy answered, glancing towards Cassie. She seemed to be calming down, though her breathing was still erratic and uneven. "And don't say that about your sister,"

"Why not?" Katherine responded, putting her hands on her hips. "It's true. Cassie cries _all_ the time. Not even babies cry that much,"

"Katherine," Percy warned. Though all of them had been affected greatly by Charlie's death, they had different ways of coping. Cassie cried all the time, while Annabeth threw herself into her books, and Katherine had been….difficult.

"What?" she asked, frowning.

"Go to bed,"

"Cassie's not in bed," Katherine pointed. "And you're not, either."

"That's not your concern. Now- _please_ ," he was begging now, but he didn't care. "Go to bed."

"Okay," Katherine muttered, seeing the look on Percy's face and retreating to her room.

Percy turned towards Cassie, who seemed to have passed out from a combination of crying so hard and pure exhaustion. Out of habit, he checked her breathing. Normal.

Percy looked in the closet for a blanket to throw on her, as he didn't want to carry her back to her own room, and he wanted to be near her if she started crying again, but he could only find towels, so he just used that one of those instead.

Exhausted, Percy was about to get into bed, but he noticed that all the lights in the hallway were on. _Katherine,_ he immediately thought, and got up to go see what the kindergartner was up to.

He found her sitting on the living room couch, eating packets of gummies, while watching what appeared to be a show about patients in with terminal cancer.

"What are you doing?" he cried. "Didn't I tell you to go to bed?"

"Yeah," Katherine said, indignant. "I tried to, Daddy, but I couldn't sleep!"

"You tried to go to sleep for what, ten minutes?" he asked. Katherine shrugged.

"Longer. But I couldn't. So I'm watching TV."

"What show is that even?" he wondered aloud.

"I don't know. But it's about my future job," Katherine replied, almost too cheerfully.

"I thought you wanted to be a counselor at camp," Percy said.

"I changed my mind. Now I want to work at the hospital, and make it so people don't die when they sleep," she added sdly. "Daddy?"

"What, Katherine?"

"I don't like funerals," she said, leaning her head sleepily against the couch.

"Neither do I," Percy said, wishing that he could still count the amount of funerals he had been to on his fingers. But he couldn't, and there was no changing that. "Let's go to bed now, okay?"

"Okay," Katherine said, turning the TV off and following her father upstairs.

"Daddy?" she asked, when she was finally tucked into bed and ready to go to sleep. "Why does Cassie cry so much?"

"I-I think she just misses Charlie," Percy said, trying to put it in a way that Katherine would understand.

"But I miss Charlie, and I don't cry so much," she argued. Percy sighed.

"Why don't we talk about this in the morning, alright?" he finally said.

"Alright," came the reply.

To say the least, it hadn't been an easy month since his son died.

 **A/N: Sleep apnea is a real thing (although pretty rare in kids). It's when you stop breathing for different periods of time while sleeping. Anywhere from several seconds to several minutes. Please feel free to PM me with any questions you have about it.**

 **And yes, you can die from lack of sleep.**

 **Please review!**


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